The playful minds of Mozart, Lewis Carroll

Perhaps this is a stretch, but I sense a certain affinity between the world’s greatest composer and a man who — next to Shakespeare and the Bible — is among the most quoted in the English language.

Both artists are highly logical and therefore fond of paradoxes, games and wit, whether musical or literary.

Supporting this contention in the case of Carroll is easy. Here’s a “Catch 22” -type paradox from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass”:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat, “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

To be sure, verbal play of this kind isn’t possible in so-called “absolute music.” But something of this same playful spirit seems evident in Mozart (at least to me). After all, balance and order are the preconditions of playfulness (what’s a game without rules?).

Mozart was all about balance and order, and the kind of playful possibilities they opened up. As critic Robert Harris observes in “What to Listen For in Mozart,” his music is full of surprises: A note that suddenly goes up when we think it might go down; a “wrong” note in the “wrong” place that ends up creating a wonderful moment of harmonic ambiguity and presses the music indelibly into our memory.